50% of consumers have not provided direct feedback to a brand in the last six months
While the friction rate of issues that frustrate customers has climbed to 77 per cent year-over-year, may consumers are choosing to stay silent, according to research published by Quantum Metric.
The Monument, Col.-based digital analytics platform provider surveyed more than 1,500 consumers in the U.S. and the U.K. and 750 digital leaders to produce its report, The 2026 Customer Voice Benchmark.
Quantum Metric found one in three consumers don’t feel heard by digital brands at all, and 37 per cent believe AI tools like ChatGPT understand their needs better.
The report suggests asking consumers to fill out feedback surveys and other forms may be a wasted effort, given 50 per cent believe contacting customer support directly is the best way to be heard.
Among those who have chosen to provide feedback, 56 per cent said they wound up switching brands because it was ignored or not acted on.
“In a time where digital competition has been enhanced by search, social media and AI, (a listening gap) can mean the difference in digital teams meeting core site KPIs and having to explain why they lost customers to a competitor,” the report’s authors wrote.
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It’s almost as though consumers sense there’s no point in sharing their opinions with some brands. More than half of the “digital leaders” surveyed in this report admitted they have no formal process for acting on feedback, and the same proportion (52 per cent) said only a quarter of the feedback they collect leads to visible change.
On the customer end, this translates directly into trust: 50 per cent of consumers said they need to see visible proof their issue was fixed in order to continue trusting the brand. This is just common sense: why would you continue the conversation with a brand when they haven’t demonstrated they can solve problems in the first place?
Quantum Metric’s ungated report does a good job of tying this back to bottom-line considerations that customer experience (CX) leaders could use to get their senior leadership team’s attention. There was a strong correlation between a lack of listening and cart abandonment rates, for example, and the research breaks this down by verticals such as financial services, travel and health care.
Creating feedback mechanisms without a clear process for analyzing and responding to what comes in is truly putting the cart before the horse. This will become an even greater issue as more brands deploy AI agents to handle a range of processes. Feedback on how AI agents perform will be essential to refine and improve where and how they’re deployed.
AI should also make it easier than ever to spot common trends within collected feedback and map out the most appropriate remedial actions that could help a brand prove it’s not only listening, but learning. This report has a lot more helpful data to support that effort.
